https://www2.polskieradio.pl/eo/dokument.aspx?iid=16964
Orlengate
05.01.2007
Letter from Poland
By Peter Gentle
In a year of political scandals, the latest to come before a special parliamentary commission empowered to investigate corruption in public life is one of the juiciest yet. It involves Poland’s richest man, a Russian spy, top Polish politicians and the geo-politics of oil.
Ever since the time of Richard Nixon and Watergate, political scandals have been suffixed by journalists as a ‘gate’. So we had Ronnie Reagan’s Iran/Contra-gate in the 1980’s and Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky-gate in the 1990’s. (If only there was a scandal involving powdered baby milk producers then we could have a Cow and Gate-gate. Or, if there was a scandal involving St Peter up in Heaven then journos would be quick to label it, I suppose, as the Pearly Gates-gate.)
In Poland over the last few years we have had quite a lot of ‘gates’. Last year, and much of this, journalists have been beavering away writing about Rywingate, a scandal involving top Polish media mogul, Lew Rywin, who allegedly got involved in an attempt to influence the contents of amendments to a broadcasting law. It all sounds quite inert, but believe me, the very foundation of the left wing in Poland has been undermined as a result of Rywingate.
Now, a scandal that began gently over the summer has turned into a media frenzy, just as the main protagonist appears before the special parliamentary commission this week.
This one goes under the name of Orlengate.
Jan Kulczyk is Poland’s richest man. And he is not just a bit richer than everyone else. If the weekly magazine Wprost is to be believed, then he is four times richer than the second richest man in Poland. His fortune is estimated to be worth around 4 billion dollars – a colossal amount of money by Polish (and anyone else’s) standards.
His investments include a 14% stake in TPSA, the huge, and quite recently part-privatized, Polish telecom company, and 10% in PKN Orlen, the Polish oil refinery based in Gdansk. Kulczyk is accused of meeting, with the full knowledge of his friend President Alexander Kwasniewski, a Russian KGB spy, to discuss the sale of the Polish oil refinery to companies based in Moscow.
The meeting between the rich guy and the KGB spy took place in Vienna in the summer of 2003. The Russian spy in question, Vladimir Alganov, is well known to Poles – he was involved in yet another political scandal in the mid 1990’s which led to the resignation of the then left-wing Prime Minister (and now head speaker in parliament), Josef Oleksy.
Subsequently, a Polish lobbyist and polo playing, Walter Mitty type character called Marek Dochnal was arrested for (allegedly) offering Polish politicians up-market cars such as Mercedes (equipped with luxurious extras such as flat-screened televisions) in exchange for the Polish government offering oil and steel contracts to Russian firms.
Kulczyk was ordered to give evidence to the parliamentary committee to explain his side of the story a couple of weeks ago. He was in the US at the time, and when his plane landed at Heathrow airport in London for a stop over, Kulczyk complained of feeling unwell and promptly checked himself into a top Harley Street clinic. The right-wing members of the investigating committee immediately pointed to this as evidence that Kulczyk was hiding behind doctors in Harley Street in an attempt to avoid having to give evidence.
But on November 30, Kulczyk, two weeks late, eventually arrived in front of the committee to face his interrogation.
The plots, counter plots, sub plots and counter sub plots are so involved in this case that I won’t bore you with all the details (mainly due to the fact that I am not sure I understand them all myself). But the crucial issue at the heart of Orlengate is this: Many people here believe that Russia under President Putin is trying to re-establish control over its former Soviet satellites. It is doing this, not, as in the old days, by military power, but through the economics of the oil industry.
Russia supplies much of Central and Eastern Europe with its oil requirements. Poland imports about 90% of her oil and gas from Russia. If Russia got control, not just of supply but also of refining Polish oil, then the country and its energy needs would be at the mercy of Moscow.
And it’s in this context, by the way, that many are viewing what is going on in the Ukraine. The West, in the guise of Washington and Brussels, and the East, in the shape of President Putin, are battling for control of the former eastern bloc.
The left in Poland, on the other hand, see the Orlengate and Rywingate scandals as ways in which the right wing are trying to persecute and destroy the ex-communist left. And if this is the intention, then it’s working. If opinion polls are to believed then the next general election here, which will probably take place in late Spring next year, will see the decimation of the current left wing governing party, the SLD.
But all that is half a year away, or more. Plenty of time for a few more corruption scandals and a few more Poland-gates.